Note: This reply got really off-topic as I wrote it, but I still think it is an interesting train of throught. Got me thinking about languages, at least. So it may be a little rambling... I apologize in advance for any hard-to-understand prose.
"Really cool work", can be done in any language, and the proliferation of languages shows that there's many solutions to the same problem.
That's generally true except for some niche markets. There are still a few things, which should be programmed in assembly or a lower-level language like C. Problems with extreme memory or speed requirements are often only solvable with languages invented when most computers benchmarked against those extreme memory or speed specs.
when the language design is flawed, only deep education of the masses (as in, don't do this, you'll regret it) can save the language.
I don't think most languages - C++ in particular - are flawed. They rather represent different tradeoffs between ease of writing small programs, ease of writing large programs, limiting performance, capabilities, and extensibility.
For instance, Java and Python provide large built-in libraries to make programs less complex. Those two languages are also generally implemented via virtual machines. VMs provide a medium between slow-but-safe (and highly portable) interpreted languages like BASIC, ECMAScript or Haskell and the traditional fast-but-dangerous compiled languages such as C/C++ or others. Also C++ was originally implemented in C macros - wasn't it? That's extreme extensibility. However, you don't want to use those features for individual projects: it'll only add complexity and thus a greater chance of bugs. Those features are generally useful for niche experiments, debugging, or sharing code among many projects. As a movie said (or something like it), with great extensibility comes great responsibility.:-}
There are many more examples. Special-purpose languages like XSLT which do one thing really well (in this case, interpret data) and suck at almost everything else. (The game of Life can be implemented in XSLT, but why?:-} ) Some languages are easier to use in some professions than others - i.e. Lisp and Haskell in Comp Sci; Matlab and Mathematica in Engineering (although everyone really hates them); I once saw a psychology experiment written in Pascal (why? I don't know!). The choice of a programming language is all about design tradeoffs. The requirements of the problem dictate which class of languages are best suited - it doesn't make one right or one wrong.
That's an interesting point. Somebody will often post a copy or mirror of an article or web site if the original has been slashdotted. The copy has been presented because the original is unavailable due to technical reasons: It is the author's intent to keep the page up, but there isn't enough bandwidth. Is that still copyright infringement if permission hasn't been obtained prior? What about Google's cache?
Mozilla does not use the GPL. It uses the MPL which is very different.
That is not true, according to Mozilla.org's licensing policy. They intend to license everything under a three licenses where possible: the GPL, LGPL, and MPL. You could make a GPL derivative of most of Mozilla's code (with a few exceptions), you just can't fork your modifications back into the tree without licensing it under the LGPL and MPL as well.
It could be a tied deal: say, this user by accepting newsletter puts this 1 cent in deposit at trusted third party. User unsubscribes - this 1 cent goes back to company.
So I have to pay the company to unsubscribe? That doesn't sound like an enticing deal to me!
have you heard of "tragedy of the commons" or "overgrazing" problem?
No I haven't heard of the "tragedy of the commons", but a quick google primer was insightful. Thanks for the heads up. However, there are a few crucial differences between the hypothetical environmental dilemma and the spam problem.
The tragedy of the commons is an attractive model of the spam problem at a first glance. Spammers use more than their fair share of bandwidth, which increased the cost to all of us. They cause "environmental" damaged by increasing the "noise to signal ratio" in our electronic mailboxes. These are all features of Garrett Hardin's model of the tragedy of the commons.
From an experimentalist's point-of-view, Hardin's model when applied to email doesn't accuracy predict the nature of the spam problem. For instance, in his example there is an incentive for most people to commit environmental damage, yet only a very tiny minority of email users spam others. This implies that there are some additional costs in spam production. One barrier is that it takes enough technical knowledge to even determine how to send spam around existing filters. Another barrier are the laws against such activity. Furthermore, a flat tax approach hasn't been shown to stop spam in postal mail, so I doubt a risky taxation approach would work with email.
I also doubt that this would lead to a larger amount of "meaningful" messages exchanged over the Internet. Every technology in history, which increase the flow of meaningful information, has done so by decreasing the costs of distribution. This risky taxation approach does the opposite. It's like decreasing the amount of noise in a signal by using a less conductive medium. This is not very efficient in reducing noise, yet it lowers the overall intensity and amount of useful information transmitted. The risky taxation method also seems to punish everyone for the actions of a few, something that should be avoided if possible. Even worse, it jeopardizes free speech via email. Politicians could raise the costs rivals via their supporters demanding money from the others' newsletters. If I don't like what you say, then I could charge for that penny. If you send a newsletter, then I could shut it down via a bot. There are just too many possibilities for abuse and too few checks and balances to trust a risky taxation system.
the serious problem is TREATING OUR ATTENTION AS IF IT WERE FREE AND UNLIMITED RESOURCE, while it is gradually becoming more and more scarce!
My attention is definitely not becoming more scarce, by definition is is fixed by the hours of my non-sleep activity. Furthermore, I choose what to pay attention to, so it isn't free to advertisers - nor is it treated as such otherwise there would be nothing but commercials on TV, on the Internet, or in magazines! That makes no sense to me.
Your spam solution could be abused
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There are several scenarios where your proposal would be bad for the Internet. Say I want to put my competitor out of business, or at least raise his costs. I simply use a bot to sign up for a couple hundred thousand email addresses, sign up for his newsletters, then ask for all those 1 cents back. The financial powers that be might also foresee too much liability and risk in ventures that depend on email (since it is, as you say, gambling). Thus the end of any free service that depends on e-mail for verifying accounts including newsletters, bulletin boards, online banking, and online auctions among others.
Furthermore, you'd have to have a foolproof system to pay for those cents. Fraud could be much more rampant: If you pay via credit card, the other guy (or gal) has your number and could overcharge a corporation by a twenty or so dollars. Furthermore, micropayments aren't economical unless many many many people pay. If most people play by the rules, then the costs of credit companies or banks or other institutions would either put most of these services out-of-business or into subscription only domains. Not to mention some companies might have "you agree not to ask for those cents" in addition to "I can send you spam" legal clauses - negating your proposal!
I am personally offended by that remark. I believe that jury duty is a responsibility of almost every citizen. We Americans get a bargain simply by being born here; there are a lot of worse places in the world. Service of some kind (whether through Open Source contributions, charity work, or service in the armed forces) is generally a way to keep America a bargain. Furthermore, there can't be speedy trials (a right, not a privilege, in the US) with a shortage of jurors. Finally, the defendants and plaintiffs in a court deserve an impartial jury of their peers. If you jerk out of your duty simply because you don't want to be bothered, then you're not being very considerate. }:-{
What you want is a Relax-NG Schema. DTDs only define the barest bones of XML structure.
Except that DTDs are also currently the only standard way to expand general entities in a document. I wish there was a standard entity definition language independent of validation languages such as RELAX NG. Tim Bray once had an idea, but that seems to have gone nowhere.:-( XSLT could be used to do it, but transformations of that nature are slow and clunky when compared with entities. XML 2.0 needs a new doctype declaration mechanism. The SGML-inherited one is too limited!
...but in many circumstances people who develop free software do so independently of larger backing -- they do it out of the goodness of their heart, their desire to contribute. That doesn't pay the bills. Then, companies such as yours take his work, make it their own (as they have every right to do--he specifically grants them that right when he releases the software), and profit from it.
Then all the kind programmer has to do is halt development or threaten to do so. The code is still his; however, the companies that profit from his work can no longer do so (since the software is no longer being maintained). Those companies - the successful ones - would probably hire our intrepid programmer to continue development. After all, he has the most skills when it comes to that particular code base; it would be more expensive to hire a new programmer to maintain it. That reduces the risk of development stalling. Reduced risks translates into lower costs and more stability when dealing with loans. It makes business sense to hire the programmer on whose code your profits depend.
Besides, there are other types of compensation for our hero: The resume power would pretty much guarantee any job he wants.
Warning, I did NOT RTA, so please excuse any redundancy.;-)
Warning: this is a little off-topic, but it is an issue I am concerned about.
I hope you're being sarcastic, since Open Source software has nothing to do with threatening capitalism. In fact, I would argue that OSS is in the spirit of capitalism!
At its core, capitalism is about minimizing costs of creating and distributing resources through competition. Risk is one of those costs, yet OSS reduces those risks when compared with other proprietary solutions. No large-scale software projects are free of bugs, so a risk of using any software is the stability of the creator. The firm may go out of business; the software may be discontinued; or the firm may charge more over time. OSS can be developed indefinitely, even after the original creators can not be relied upon to maintain it at a reasonable price. That is the value of the source code.
What are the advantages of open, Free (as in Freedom) code? One problem with any software includes the development costs of programmers and the project's administration. A firm could hire programmers to create code under any license (open or closed) requested, but these costs can be huge for large-scale projects (the projects from the above paragraph). It makes sense that if programming resources could be spread throughout the marketplace, then an individual firm's cost of software maintenance could be reduced to feasible levels. But how does one firm encourage its competitors to cooperate with it? The answer are open standards. For over two hundred years, it has been shown that common, open standards - such as money values, weights and measures, or product specifications, among others - help reduce costs as a whole in a market. (Note that when the price of a product is determined more by demand than supply, then this translates into higher profits.) By allowing the source code of a software application to be open and free from abuse by any one firm (hence, Free), then the code gains the advantages of open standards. The contributions by one firm can't be stolen by another firm, and additional restrictions and costs - like royalties or other fees - can't be levied by any one firm. Hence, Free OSS is more economical than proprietary closed source software for large, complicated projects.
But does the sharing of code go against capitalism? No! There is competition between open source software projects (such as Gnome vs. KDE, Mozilla vs. Konqueror, Linux vs. BSD). The market forces help streamline the administration/design of any individual projects, or it will be dominated by others and eventually become irrelevant. The users of OSS lower their individual costs and become more competitive in their respective markets. (For instance, OSS lowers IBM's costs of maintaining software. They can't really sell it, but IBM gets their money back - and more - by selling their experience with the software!) Thus, Open Source software lets firms be more competitive.
Note that some software projects are either too small or too big to be economically Open Source. The market may not be large enough to support the costs of the program (such as large databases like encyclopedias, or complex programs like robotic control software). On the other hand, there might not be enough interest in other projects (such as program documentation, which is generally poor in the open source community). Still other types of software may be the product (such as entertainment software like games or web-logging tools, or other commercial software such as p2p clients). Despite these limits, a lot of software could be economically Free OSS in a capitalistic society. Of course, others could be fueled by volunteer efforts for which we should be more grateful.
Please accept my apologizes for this rather long, rambling rant. I get worked up sometimes: I hope you understand.:-)
There was actually a Star Trek episode about this very idea. Basically, two worlds were involved in a bloody war. Somehow a deal was struck that they would continue the war with computer simulations, and the outcome would be accepted. The problem was that war became so easy that the two nations remained in this state for over two hundred years! Kirk destroyed the computers so that the two worlds finally had an incentive to stop their conflict: mutually assured destruction.
I'm not saying that the Pentagon's idea is bad, but that it raises a lot of interesting questions.
That's easy to fix! I simply add a set of anti-purchase strings to my query. Terms such as -purchase -merchant -buy -sell -sex -porn work well. Advertisers are in a jam because they want to be at the top for a search, but also want to sell you something. I've found that method to filter about 75% of all spam on Google.
There really isn't much to fear from getting sucked into an artificial black holes, from being turned into strange matter, or from other proposed Armageddon scenarios. This is explained in this article from Popular Science and this paper on speculative Disaster Scenarios at another particle collider. Basically, there is a large probability that - if these objects are really dangerous - then they would have been already been produced by natural particle collisions in outer space near enough to destroy the earth. Since we exist, these objects can't really be dangerous!
Sigh. Am I the only person who thinks that Googlebombing is childish? It's basically the same technique spammers use to pervert their popularity on the search engine. Worse, it prevents surfers from getting undisturpted, unbaised information about a topic. For instance, how can Bush be both a miserable failure and a great president! These PageRanks make no logical sence when taken together, but googlebombing disrupted the normal weights for Bush on these topics. I don't care what the intentions are, purposely trying to change Google's PageRank is wrong.
the average user still uses the internet for email,
online banking, and news sites. (emphasis mine)
Um, I don't think the average user uses the internet for online banking. Nobody else that I know of does, and a statistic site claims that only 17% of Americans use online banking. Furthermore - although I only use those sites sparingly - I never had any problems banking with Mozilla. Thus, I feel that your concerns are overblown.
Enterprise Linux doesn't seem to offer an advantage unless you're using four or more processors. Solaris (and, Java Desktop, I assume) seems to be a better deal for regular workstations or servers... I imagine that only high-end servers and "mainframes" seem to benefit from the price. No wonder Red Hat doesn't see a future for desktop Linux... they're prices are too expensive!
The second trailer for Episode 1 The Phantom Menace has never looked so crazy. Tongue way in cheek throughout When Senators Attack IV lampoons the entire Phantom Menace trailer...
WARNING: If you like Jar-jar or normalcy, then you may wish to avoid the trailer.
I already did, a few days ago. Here's an edited version of my letter:
Dear Senator ########,
I am student of the University of ##########, and I request that you do not to vote for bill, H. R. 2517 "Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003," if it is passed on to the Senate. The bill forces the FBI to devote assets for program to deter the traffic of copyrighted materials through the internet. I find this a poor use of FBI resources, which could be better served toward Homeland Defense, deterring child pornography, investigating drug traffickers, or other more worthy endeavors. I hope that you take these objections into consideration.
And Persephone, a sexy bad-girl-turned-good who hooks Neo up with the all-important Keymaker.
NO NO NO! That's wrong! He's not the Keymaker, he's the Keymaster. And he gets it on with the Gatekeeper before turning into a giant dog - pet of Gozer! Jeeze!
Slashdot Mirror
Note: This reply got really off-topic as I wrote it, but I still think it is an interesting train of throught. Got me thinking about languages, at least. So it may be a little rambling... I apologize in advance for any hard-to-understand prose.
That's generally true except for some niche markets. There are still a few things, which should be programmed in assembly or a lower-level language like C. Problems with extreme memory or speed requirements are often only solvable with languages invented when most computers benchmarked against those extreme memory or speed specs.
I don't think most languages - C++ in particular - are flawed. They rather represent different tradeoffs between ease of writing small programs, ease of writing large programs, limiting performance, capabilities, and extensibility.
For instance, Java and Python provide large built-in libraries to make programs less complex. Those two languages are also generally implemented via virtual machines. VMs provide a medium between slow-but-safe (and highly portable) interpreted languages like BASIC, ECMAScript or Haskell and the traditional fast-but-dangerous compiled languages such as C/C++ or others. Also C++ was originally implemented in C macros - wasn't it? That's extreme extensibility. However, you don't want to use those features for individual projects: it'll only add complexity and thus a greater chance of bugs. Those features are generally useful for niche experiments, debugging, or sharing code among many projects. As a movie said (or something like it), with great extensibility comes great responsibility. :-}
There are many more examples. Special-purpose languages like XSLT which do one thing really well (in this case, interpret data) and suck at almost everything else. (The game of Life can be implemented in XSLT, but why? :-} ) Some languages are easier to use in some professions than others - i.e. Lisp and Haskell in Comp Sci; Matlab and Mathematica in Engineering (although everyone really hates them); I once saw a psychology experiment written in Pascal (why? I don't know!). The choice of a programming language is all about design tradeoffs. The requirements of the problem dictate which class of languages are best suited - it doesn't make one right or one wrong.
That's an interesting point. Somebody will often post a copy or mirror of an article or web site if the original has been slashdotted. The copy has been presented because the original is unavailable due to technical reasons: It is the author's intent to keep the page up, but there isn't enough bandwidth. Is that still copyright infringement if permission hasn't been obtained prior? What about Google's cache?
Then why not post your patch here so we can try it for ourselves?
Could an emulator like VMWare be useful? You could run a second Windows installation in a "sandbox" to use the old programs.
That is not true, according to Mozilla.org's licensing policy. They intend to license everything under a three licenses where possible: the GPL, LGPL, and MPL. You could make a GPL derivative of most of Mozilla's code (with a few exceptions), you just can't fork your modifications back into the tree without licensing it under the LGPL and MPL as well.
So I have to pay the company to unsubscribe? That doesn't sound like an enticing deal to me!
No I haven't heard of the "tragedy of the commons", but a quick google primer was insightful. Thanks for the heads up. However, there are a few crucial differences between the hypothetical environmental dilemma and the spam problem.
The tragedy of the commons is an attractive model of the spam problem at a first glance. Spammers use more than their fair share of bandwidth, which increased the cost to all of us. They cause "environmental" damaged by increasing the "noise to signal ratio" in our electronic mailboxes. These are all features of Garrett Hardin's model of the tragedy of the commons.
From an experimentalist's point-of-view, Hardin's model when applied to email doesn't accuracy predict the nature of the spam problem. For instance, in his example there is an incentive for most people to commit environmental damage, yet only a very tiny minority of email users spam others. This implies that there are some additional costs in spam production. One barrier is that it takes enough technical knowledge to even determine how to send spam around existing filters. Another barrier are the laws against such activity. Furthermore, a flat tax approach hasn't been shown to stop spam in postal mail, so I doubt a risky taxation approach would work with email.
I also doubt that this would lead to a larger amount of "meaningful" messages exchanged over the Internet. Every technology in history, which increase the flow of meaningful information, has done so by decreasing the costs of distribution. This risky taxation approach does the opposite. It's like decreasing the amount of noise in a signal by using a less conductive medium. This is not very efficient in reducing noise, yet it lowers the overall intensity and amount of useful information transmitted. The risky taxation method also seems to punish everyone for the actions of a few, something that should be avoided if possible. Even worse, it jeopardizes free speech via email. Politicians could raise the costs rivals via their supporters demanding money from the others' newsletters. If I don't like what you say, then I could charge for that penny. If you send a newsletter, then I could shut it down via a bot. There are just too many possibilities for abuse and too few checks and balances to trust a risky taxation system.
My attention is definitely not becoming more scarce, by definition is is fixed by the hours of my non-sleep activity. Furthermore, I choose what to pay attention to, so it isn't free to advertisers - nor is it treated as such otherwise there would be nothing but commercials on TV, on the Internet, or in magazines! That makes no sense to me.
There are several scenarios where your proposal would be bad for the Internet. Say I want to put my competitor out of business, or at least raise his costs. I simply use a bot to sign up for a couple hundred thousand email addresses, sign up for his newsletters, then ask for all those 1 cents back. The financial powers that be might also foresee too much liability and risk in ventures that depend on email (since it is, as you say, gambling). Thus the end of any free service that depends on e-mail for verifying accounts including newsletters, bulletin boards, online banking, and online auctions among others.
Furthermore, you'd have to have a foolproof system to pay for those cents. Fraud could be much more rampant: If you pay via credit card, the other guy (or gal) has your number and could overcharge a corporation by a twenty or so dollars. Furthermore, micropayments aren't economical unless many many many people pay. If most people play by the rules, then the costs of credit companies or banks or other institutions would either put most of these services out-of-business or into subscription only domains. Not to mention some companies might have "you agree not to ask for those cents" in addition to "I can send you spam" legal clauses - negating your proposal!
I am personally offended by that remark. I believe that jury duty is a responsibility of almost every citizen. We Americans get a bargain simply by being born here; there are a lot of worse places in the world. Service of some kind (whether through Open Source contributions, charity work, or service in the armed forces) is generally a way to keep America a bargain. Furthermore, there can't be speedy trials (a right, not a privilege, in the US) with a shortage of jurors. Finally, the defendants and plaintiffs in a court deserve an impartial jury of their peers. If you jerk out of your duty simply because you don't want to be bothered, then you're not being very considerate. }:-{
Except that DTDs are also currently the only standard way to expand general entities in a document. I wish there was a standard entity definition language independent of validation languages such as RELAX NG. Tim Bray once had an idea, but that seems to have gone nowhere. :-( XSLT could be used to do it, but transformations of that nature are slow and clunky when compared with entities. XML 2.0 needs a new doctype declaration mechanism. The SGML-inherited one is too limited!
Isn't that what money is designed to do: quantify value in standard units? That's why we don't use barter for everything in trade.
It's not money that is the problem; it is wanting compensation for everything you give. A soul without charity is barren.
Then all the kind programmer has to do is halt development or threaten to do so. The code is still his; however, the companies that profit from his work can no longer do so (since the software is no longer being maintained). Those companies - the successful ones - would probably hire our intrepid programmer to continue development. After all, he has the most skills when it comes to that particular code base; it would be more expensive to hire a new programmer to maintain it. That reduces the risk of development stalling. Reduced risks translates into lower costs and more stability when dealing with loans. It makes business sense to hire the programmer on whose code your profits depend.
Besides, there are other types of compensation for our hero: The resume power would pretty much guarantee any job he wants.
Warning, I did NOT RTA, so please excuse any redundancy. ;-)
Warning: this is a little off-topic, but it is an issue I am concerned about.
I hope you're being sarcastic, since Open Source software has nothing to do with threatening capitalism. In fact, I would argue that OSS is in the spirit of capitalism!
At its core, capitalism is about minimizing costs of creating and distributing resources through competition. Risk is one of those costs, yet OSS reduces those risks when compared with other proprietary solutions. No large-scale software projects are free of bugs, so a risk of using any software is the stability of the creator. The firm may go out of business; the software may be discontinued; or the firm may charge more over time. OSS can be developed indefinitely, even after the original creators can not be relied upon to maintain it at a reasonable price. That is the value of the source code.
What are the advantages of open, Free (as in Freedom) code? One problem with any software includes the development costs of programmers and the project's administration. A firm could hire programmers to create code under any license (open or closed) requested, but these costs can be huge for large-scale projects (the projects from the above paragraph). It makes sense that if programming resources could be spread throughout the marketplace, then an individual firm's cost of software maintenance could be reduced to feasible levels. But how does one firm encourage its competitors to cooperate with it? The answer are open standards. For over two hundred years, it has been shown that common, open standards - such as money values, weights and measures, or product specifications, among others - help reduce costs as a whole in a market. (Note that when the price of a product is determined more by demand than supply, then this translates into higher profits.) By allowing the source code of a software application to be open and free from abuse by any one firm (hence, Free), then the code gains the advantages of open standards. The contributions by one firm can't be stolen by another firm, and additional restrictions and costs - like royalties or other fees - can't be levied by any one firm. Hence, Free OSS is more economical than proprietary closed source software for large, complicated projects.
But does the sharing of code go against capitalism? No! There is competition between open source software projects (such as Gnome vs. KDE, Mozilla vs. Konqueror, Linux vs. BSD). The market forces help streamline the administration/design of any individual projects, or it will be dominated by others and eventually become irrelevant. The users of OSS lower their individual costs and become more competitive in their respective markets. (For instance, OSS lowers IBM's costs of maintaining software. They can't really sell it, but IBM gets their money back - and more - by selling their experience with the software!) Thus, Open Source software lets firms be more competitive.
Note that some software projects are either too small or too big to be economically Open Source. The market may not be large enough to support the costs of the program (such as large databases like encyclopedias, or complex programs like robotic control software). On the other hand, there might not be enough interest in other projects (such as program documentation, which is generally poor in the open source community). Still other types of software may be the product (such as entertainment software like games or web-logging tools, or other commercial software such as p2p clients). Despite these limits, a lot of software could be economically Free OSS in a capitalistic society. Of course, others could be fueled by volunteer efforts for which we should be more grateful.
Please accept my apologizes for this rather long, rambling rant. I get worked up sometimes: I hope you understand. :-)
There was actually a Star Trek episode about this very idea. Basically, two worlds were involved in a bloody war. Somehow a deal was struck that they would continue the war with computer simulations, and the outcome would be accepted. The problem was that war became so easy that the two nations remained in this state for over two hundred years! Kirk destroyed the computers so that the two worlds finally had an incentive to stop their conflict: mutually assured destruction.
I'm not saying that the Pentagon's idea is bad, but that it raises a lot of interesting questions.
Postscript: Darn! xleeko beat me to it!
That's easy to fix! I simply add a set of anti-purchase strings to my query. Terms such as -purchase -merchant -buy -sell -sex -porn work well. Advertisers are in a jam because they want to be at the top for a search, but also want to sell you something. I've found that method to filter about 75% of all spam on Google.
I guess Google is a victim of its own success.
There really isn't much to fear from getting sucked into an artificial black holes, from being turned into strange matter, or from other proposed Armageddon scenarios. This is explained in this article from Popular Science and this paper on speculative Disaster Scenarios at another particle collider. Basically, there is a large probability that - if these objects are really dangerous - then they would have been already been produced by natural particle collisions in outer space near enough to destroy the earth. Since we exist, these objects can't really be dangerous!
Sigh. Am I the only person who thinks that Googlebombing is childish? It's basically the same technique spammers use to pervert their popularity on the search engine. Worse, it prevents surfers from getting undisturpted, unbaised information about a topic. For instance, how can Bush be both a miserable failure and a great president! These PageRanks make no logical sence when taken together, but googlebombing disrupted the normal weights for Bush on these topics. I don't care what the intentions are, purposely trying to change Google's PageRank is wrong.
Doh! I didn't even see that. Nice pun. :-)
Sorry, I should have called them "mission control" I guess. (Although I just watched The Right Stuff before submitting the article.)
Um, I don't think the average user uses the internet for online banking. Nobody else that I know of does, and a statistic site claims that only 17% of Americans use online banking. Furthermore - although I only use those sites sparingly - I never had any problems banking with Mozilla. Thus, I feel that your concerns are overblown.
It's interesting how the prices compare:
Enterprise Linux doesn't seem to offer an advantage unless you're using four or more processors. Solaris (and, Java Desktop, I assume) seems to be a better deal for regular workstations or servers... I imagine that only high-end servers and "mainframes" seem to benefit from the price. No wonder Red Hat doesn't see a future for desktop Linux... they're prices are too expensive!
I guess we have different tastes then; I think its really funny.
Check out Episode I: When Senators Attack. Man, it's the funniest thing I've seen in ages! From TFN:
WARNING: If you like Jar-jar or normalcy, then you may wish to avoid the trailer.
I already did, a few days ago. Here's an edited version of my letter:
Dear Senator ########,
I am student of the University of ##########, and I request that you do not to vote for bill, H. R. 2517 "Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003," if it is passed on to the Senate. The bill forces the FBI to devote assets for program to deter the traffic of copyrighted materials through the internet. I find this a poor use of FBI resources, which could be better served toward Homeland Defense, deterring child pornography, investigating drug traffickers, or other more worthy endeavors. I hope that you take these objections into consideration.
Sincerely,
##### ## #####
NO NO NO! That's wrong! He's not the Keymaker, he's the Keymaster. And he gets it on with the Gatekeeper before turning into a giant dog - pet of Gozer! Jeeze!
Well I don't intend to be sardonic. What does that saying mean? What am I missing?